Chesapeake Energy Corp.'s stock took a mid-week tumble, after a news report that Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Aubrey McClendon used his stakes in company wells as collateral to finance his share of the well costs, Bloombrg News reported.

Numerous stories were filed this week after federal researchers presented a paper on earthhquakes and fracking-waste injection wells at a national conference in San Diego.

Researchers think increased seismic activity in the central United States including Ohio is tied to wastewater injected below ground by the oil and gas industry, said William Ellsworth of the U.S. Geological Survey.

Pennsylvania's top health official has assured doctors that a new gas-drilling law will allow them to talk with their patients about proprietary chemicals used in the hydraulic fracturing process and share that information with public health agencies and regulatory bodies as they see fit, the Associated Press reported this week.

More than two months after the Pennsylvania Medical Society expressed concerns, Health Secretary Dr. Eli Avila clarified a provision of the new law that requires doctors to sign a nondisclosure agreement in return for access to secret information on fracking chemicals.

Pro Publica's Lena Groeger reports on the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's first-ever regulations on fracking and how they only deal with air pollution.

She writes that the new rules announced this week target one large source of air pollution: the burst of gas released during the first few days after a well is first tapped but before production begins.

Fuel marketer Global Partners LP is more than doubling rail capacity at its Albany, N.Y., terminal to boost shipments of cheap Bakken crude from North Dakota to struggling refiners in the U.S. Northeast, Bloomberg News reports.

A company hired to conduct seismic testing in Columbiana County for Chesapeake Energy Corp. contends five landowners have illegally kept the company off their properties, the Youngstown Vindicator reports.

The Ohio Farmers Union supports a moratorium on new permits for drilling into the Utica shale until the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency releases its initial assessment on the drilling technique and the threat to ground water late this year.

The group is also hosting a program in Windsor in Ashtabula County on Monday, April 23, on drilling and ground water.

The Muskingum Conservancy Watershed District’s governing board today unanimously approved the sale of water from Clendening Reservoir in eastern Ohio to a drilling company for hydraulic fracturing or fracking.

Gulfport Energy Corp., an Oklahoma-based energy firm, can start taking water from the reservoir on Monday under a temporary water agreement.

The firm wants to take up to 11 million gallons of water from the lake for its nearby well in Harrison County.

It will pay $9 per 1,000 gallons or about $99,000, officials said after the meeting in New Philadelphia.

Gulfport said it intends to build a temporary water pipeline to reduce heavy truck traffic that would otherwise be needed.

The Clendening sale marks one of the first sale of water from Ohio’s public inland lakes to drillers in search of water for fracking.

The water agreement with Gulfport marks the first contract approved by the 18-county district to provide water to a drilling company.

The district has had inquiries from a dozen drilling companies about selling water from six of its reservoirs in eastern Ohio to drillers.

The drillers are most interested Clendening, Atwood Lake in Carroll and Tuscarawas counties, Leesville in Carroll County, Piedmont Lake in Belmont County, Senecaville Lake in Noble and Guernsey counties and Tappan Lake in Harrison County.

The district’s 18-judge panel, known as the Muskingum Watershed Conservancy Court, is expected to deal on June 2 with a selling price for water that could allow additional water deals to advance.

Chesapeake Energy Corp., the No. 1 oil-gas player in eastern Ohio, is buying water from the city of Steubenville. It has also purchased water from other communities and from landowners with wells being drilled. Some drilling companies have legally tapped water from small streams in eastern Ohio.

The Muskingum Conservancy Watershed District’s governing board today unanimously approved the sale of water from Clendening Reservoir in eastern Ohio to a drilling company for hydraulic fracturing or fracking.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency today approved the first-ever clean-air rules on drilling for natural gas with hydraulic fracturing or fracking, but environmentalists aren’t happy with a 2½-year delay in implementing a key portion of the new rules.

The long-awaited air rules are not expected to have a big impact on the shale drilling boom in Ohio and other states, experts said.

The new safeguards, when fully implemented, will cut emissions of volatile organic compounds from drilling by nearly 25 percent and cut VOC emissions from new and modified fracked wells by almost 95 percent, the EPA said.

The agency said the new limits would reduce VOC emissions from drilling by 190,000 to 290,000 tons a year and cancer-causing benzene levels would be cut by 12,000 to 20,000 tons a year.

It will also reduce escaped methane, the key component of natural gas and a potent global warming gas, by 1 million to 1.7 million tons a year, the agency said.

Such chemicals — seen as a growing problem — produce unhealthy smog, put health-threatening toxics including hexane and formaldehyde into the air and contribute to global warming.

The new rules are a first effort by the federal EPA to regulate fracking.

But the Obama administration, which has strongly backed natural gas drilling, made significant concessions to the oil and gas industry that engaged in heavy last-minute lobbying. That includes a delay in requiring that gases be captured at the well until Jan. 1, 2015.

The original federal plan called for compliance in 60 days, but the industry got more flexibility in the new rules.

The industry had argued that stricter federal rules could cut back on natural gas production by 11 percent, oil production by 37 percent and that fracking would be cut by more than 50 percent.

The new rules are "practical, flexible, achievable and affordable," said EPA spokeswoman Gina McCarthy in a national teleconference.

The delay was necessary to assure the technologies needed to curtail emissions can be built and distributed and that workers can be trained, she said.

The rules cover the production, processing, transmission and storage of oil and natural gas.er, another issue with fracking.

Hydraulic fracturing has spawned a natural gas-drilling boom, but has raised environmental concerns for its toll on water and air. The new rules do not address water concerns.

The new rule won praise from environmentalists, but Ohio activists were unhappy with the delay.

The EPA is "a major step forward," said the Sierra Club and five other eco-groups in a joint statement.

Added Miriam Rotkin-Ellman of the Natural Resources Defense Council: "The rapid expansion of oil and gas drilling without modern air-pollution controls has exposed millions of Americans to a toxic brew of cancer-causing, smog-producing and climate-changing air pollutants. Left to police itself for too long, the oil and gas industry has failed to even adopt pollution controls that pay for themselves."

But Columbus-based Teresa Mills of No Frack Ohio and the Center for Health, Environment and Justice said the 2015 date is "a real letdown."

The delay is likely to result in dirtier air in eastern Ohio with its just-developing Utica shale, and Ohioans wanted the new rules implemented sooner, she said.

That dirty air in Ohio is likely to trigger increased asthma attacks, more school and work missed and major health problems, she said. "It’s very disturbing," she said.

The industry was pleased by the EPA announcement.

"Overall, EPA has made some important adjustment in the rules," said Howard Feldman of the American Petroleum Institute. "Most of the changes were constructive."

The EPA rejected a proposal by Feldman’s group to exempt a number of wells from the new clean-air rules.

Chesapeake Energy Corp, the No. 1 player in Ohio, declined comment on the new rules.

Lobbyists from Devon Energy Corp. and Chesapeake Energy sought to delay and scale back the rule, while refuting eco-group’s claims that fracking causes air pollution, Bloomberg News reported.

The two companies, both based in Oklahoma, are involved in drilling in Ohio’s Utica shale.

Southwestern Energy Co. and Devon Energy say they already use systems to capture methane and other fumes at wells, the key requirement of a rule.

What the EPA did was to update and broaden two federal Clean Air Act standards to control emissions from drilling, pumping and distributing natural gas and oil through pipelines to refineries and other processing facilities.

The EPA said half of fractured wells already deploy technologies in line with the final standards. Colorado and Wyoming have both adopted rules on air emissions from fracking.

The EPA rules include incentives aimed at encouraging drillers to use technology called green completions, which collects methane gas, the main component of natural gas, when a well is first tapped.

The system relies on truck-mounted rigs that capture these gases and put them into the pipelines to be sold at a profit instead of leaked into the air.

Starting in 2015, all wells in the United States must use the green completions technology.

The industry will also be permitted to burn or flare escaping gases until 2015, under the EPA rules.

Methane — it is 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide — and VOCs escape from wells when drilling fluids come to the surface in the three to 10 days after fracking, according to the EPA.

It said that the drilling natural gas wells accounts for 40 percent of in-the-atmosphere methane in the United States.

Captured methane can be sold, netting drillers $30 million a year, according to the EPA.

The new rules will save the industry between $11 million and $19 million a year, the EPA said.

The federal agency said about 13,000 natural gas wells are drilled and fracked or refracked annually in the United States.

The EPA announcement came in order to comply with a court-imposed deadline.

The agency got more than 150,000 comments on the new rules that were first proposed in early 2011. Three public hearings were held in Pittsburgh, Denver and Arlington, Texas.

For more information, go to www.epa.gov/airquality/oilandgas.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency today approved the first-ever clean-air rules on drilling for natural gas with hydraulic fracturing or fracking, but environmentalists aren’t happy with a 2½-year delay in implementing a key portion of the new rules.

Chesapeake Energy Corp., a leading player in Ohio’s Utica shale, intends to sell shares in its hydraulic-fracturing business to raise $862.5 million, at a time when natural gas prices are low, Bloomberg News reported.

Chesapeake Oilfield Services Inc. plans to use the proceeds from the initial offering to repay debt, make a cash distribution to its parent company and for general corporate purposes, according to a company prospectus filed on Monday.

The shares will list on the New York Stock Exchange as COS.

Goldman Sachs Group and Bank of America Corp. will lead the offering, said Oklahoma-based Chesapeake Oilfield.

The number of shares to be sold or their price range weren’t specified in the filing.

The oil field unit was reorganized into a separate unit last October in preparation for becoming publicly traded.

Last November, Chesapeake Chief Executive Officer Aubrey McClendon estimated the initial value of the business at $5 billion to $7 billion.

The company operates 111 drilling rigs and has 12 more under construction. It operates four hydraulic fracturing fleets with plans to double that number by Dec. 31.

Chesapeake has been selling stakes in natural gas and oil field to raise cash for drilling and to reduce a growing corporate debt. Its debt reached $10.3 billion at the end of 2011.

Last week, Chesapeake announced $2.6 billion in assets and future commodity sales and plans to generate another $14.9 billion in transactions by the end of 2013. Over the years, the company has sold off assets in numerous shale gas plays around the country.

Chesapeake is aggressively pursuing development of its leased holdings in Ohio where ethane, propane and butane deposits plus natural gas make such projects lucrative, even with low natural gas prices.

It is the No. 2 producer of natural gas in the United States.

Chesapeake Energy Corp., a leading player in Ohio’s Utica shale, intends to sell shares in its hydraulic-fracturing business to raise $862.5 million, at a time when natural gas prices are low, Bloomberg News reported.

President Barack Obama on Friday issued an executive order to better coordinate federal oversight of hydraulic fracturing or fracking.

The order establishes an “interagency working group” consisting of members from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the Interior Department and the Energy Department. Other federal agencies will also be involved.

The Associated Press on Wednesday reported that the price of natural gas had fallen to its lowest level in more than a decade, a remarkable decline for a commodity that not long ago was believed to be in short supply.

The country's gas supply is growing so fast that analysts worry that underground storage facilities could be full by fall and lead to further price declines.

GDF Suez SA, operator of Europe's biggest natural gas network, said it may consider investing in U.S. shale gas for export to Asia as demand grows, Bloomberg News reported.

American shale production assets would be too expensive, but GDF Suez may study investments in liquefaction and supply contracts, Deputy Head of Gas Jean-Marie Dauger said on Wednesday at a Paris conference.

In a widely reported case, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency last week dropped legal charges against Range Resources Corp. over allegations that the drilling company had polluted water wells in Texas.

In late 2010, the federal agency charged that Range wells were leaking natural gas into two homes in the Fort Worth suburbs.

Among all the smiles over the black gold rush in southern Kansas, one group stands grim-faced: existing Kansas oil and gas producers.

Last year’s arrival of large oil companies with their fat wallets and horizontal drilling rigs in Kansas has forced up the cost of exploration for some mom-and-pop operators, cut their profits and sown conflict with landowners.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency announced on Monday that it will postpone the release of its first-ever rules for reducing air pollution – particularly methane and smog-forming emissions – related to the hydraulic fracturing process for two weeks.

That will enable the agency to review the more than 150,000 comments that have been submitted regarding the rules, The Wall Street Journal reports.

COLUMBUS: Ohio geologists’ latest effort to map the best areas for Utica shale oil and gas production shows potential for an oil reservoir in central Ohio but now excludes areas near Cleveland and in southeast Ohio.